How do you pick a champion show jumper out of the herd?
When it’s a horse that has proved itself over a set of jumps, it may seem straightforward. But what if the horse has never had a saddle on its back or been ridden, and was born merely months ago?
This weekend, at the Stephex Masters, a show jumping competition in Brussels that ends Sunday, trainers and breeders will come not only for the competition, but also in the hopes that they have an answer to that question — and that they can get their hands on a future winner.
On Friday, for the sixth year in a row, the event will include an auction of foals that were bred by Stephex Stables, a show jumping, trading and breeding stable and the host of the competition, in partnership with the farm Haras de la Pomme. All the foals are descended from elite breeding lines, but the key is trying to figure out which baby could go on to jump a 1.6-meter, or about five-foot, fence.
“The first thing is definitely going to be the bloodlines,” said Ashley Adler, the owner of Oasis Sport Horses in Cumming, Ga., which specializes in breeding and raising young horses. Then, she added, you want to look at the conformation, or build, of the horse, and “a lot of times, it’s a gut feeling based on how they move.”
Elena Pitoulis, the owner of Equinox Sport Horses, a breeding and sales business based in the Netherlands, said, “You want a horse that is uphill, you know, long-legged without being too weak, something that shows power and scope.”
She added, “You want to make sure that they cover the ground well, that they’re not stiff, that they have a nice elastic trot.”
You also want to try to make out the horse’s character — which can be difficult in an auction arena filled with people and bright lights, she said.
“You don’t want them to be too hot or too spooky,” she said. But you also don’t want a foal to be “completely nonreactive to anything at all, because then it might not be careful enough” in the show arena.
Pedigree is an important indicator of a horse’s future success, Adler said. “You really have to look at the dam line and go back a couple generations,” she added, saying it was important to “go back and really prioritize that consistency in the lineage. So if the mother’s had other offspring that have been successful, or if sisters or grandmothers” have done well, that is a good foundation to judge possible success.
“To produce a horse, it takes a lot of time, a lot of emotion, a lot of sensibility, a lot of love,” said Stephan Conter, the founder and chief executive of Stephex Group.
For a great foal, he explained, “you start with a mare that had charisma, a character that was a fighter.” Intelligence and spirit are what make a horse a champion, he said: “When you couple horses together, you try to create the best baby who meets the mentality, the carefulness, the agility, the speed, the blood.”
That is why he focuses his breeding operation on horses that have proved themselves at top-level competitions, Conter said.
Some buyers are very discerning when it comes to bloodlines. Lieven Bruyneel, who said he had purchased seven foals from Stephex over the years, said he focused his purchases from Stephex on foals descended from Erenice Horta, a mare born in 2004 who has been a successful show jumper and the dam of several top horses.
Buying a horse with top bloodlines is no small proposition: At the Stephex auction last year, the foal that sold for the top price was Hohneck Pommex Z, going for 81,000 euros, or about $94,000. The average sale price at the auction was 47,000 euros per foal.
Horses are bought and sold at various stages of life, from embryo to retirement as broodmares (which are specifically used for breeding). But buying horses as foals, when there is still a long road to the show arena, can be risky, breeders say.
“I prefer to buy them a little bit older, when you can see a little bit more about the horse, because a foal is a total roulette,” Pitoulis said. “You can have a foal with a fantastic pedigree, and still it’s not for sure that it’s going to be a champion.”
X-rays, which can reveal bone problems that might thwart a jumper’s career, expose more once a horse is a bit older, Pitoulis said. And many foals are turned out in pastures with other young horses for several years until they are old enough to be trained under saddle. During that time, the horse could get injured, she noted.
But buying a foal is less risky than buying an embryo, Adler said, as complications can arise during breeding and birth. So why buy a foal rather than a fully grown horse? “It’s kind of like a blank slate,” Adler said.
It takes years for a foal to go from an auction to the show-jumping arena, and there are myriad influences that can shape the horse’s potential, Pitoulis said — from how its mother acts toward it in the first few months of life to its diet and its first rider.
Often, “when you buy a foal, then the price is less,” Bruyneel said, “but you take a lot of risk.”
For buyers like him, that risk is part of the excitement.
“Yes, you take a big risk because you don’t know anything about that foal,” Bruyneel said. But sometimes when he sees a foal at auction, he knows it is the right horse to buy because he gets “a feeling — I can’t explain it. It’s just a feeling when I see it.” And, he added, “sometimes you have to be a little bit lucky.”
The post At the Stephex Masters Horse Auction, Buyers Hope to Nab a Champion appeared first on New York Times.
